Curious to know which one that was, if you’re willing to share?
Writing a good post on an important topic is only half the equation. It’s also important for the audience to be ready and interested to hear it. This creates a real problem, I think. Especially when you can’t get feedback on whether people ignore/disagree with the post’s importance/relevance, or whether they disagree with its object-level thinking.
Sure, if you are interested, some of these are below, in reverse chronological order, but, I am quite sure, your reaction would match that of the others: either a shrug or a cringe.
And yes, I agree that the reasons are related to both the writing style, and to the audience being “ready and interested to hear it.”
Uninformed Elevation of Trust is a real and pervasive phenomenon whose manifestation we see all the time, such as people relying on their trusted friends for vaccination decisions, or believing Michio Kaku’s musings about string theory, or r/WSB about “stonks”.
I’ve been thinking recently that prolific LW writers should occasionally go back and do a literature review of their own posts. When I write, I’m usually (not always) presenting freshly-developed thoughts. It’s like a miniature version of Kuhn, where one paradigm replaces another in rapid succession. Many threads are abandoned entirely. I assume others experience something like this too.
It amounts to research debt, where any individual article must be assumed to reflect something to the very primordial beginnings of thought on a subject, with a low prior likelihood of remaining relevant. Hence, there’s a relatively low cost to ignoring individual articles.
But by going back and identifying the areas where you have made sustained intellectual progress, I think it could help address this problem of research debt. It might also help give others a reasonable cause to investigate those threads of yours more closely.
Curious to know which one that was, if you’re willing to share?
Writing a good post on an important topic is only half the equation. It’s also important for the audience to be ready and interested to hear it. This creates a real problem, I think. Especially when you can’t get feedback on whether people ignore/disagree with the post’s importance/relevance, or whether they disagree with its object-level thinking.
Sure, if you are interested, some of these are below, in reverse chronological order, but, I am quite sure, your reaction would match that of the others: either a shrug or a cringe.
And yes, I agree that the reasons are related to both the writing style, and to the audience being “ready and interested to hear it.”
Uninformed Elevation of Trust is a real and pervasive phenomenon whose manifestation we see all the time, such as people relying on their trusted friends for vaccination decisions, or believing Michio Kaku’s musings about string theory, or r/WSB about “stonks”.
(Double-)Inverse Embedded Agency Problem and Monkey Values as approaches to embedded agency and human values.
A bunch of posts from 2018 on toy models of a predictable universe and embedded agency, starting with Physics has laws, the Universe might not.
Earlier posts on subjective vs objective.
I’ve been thinking recently that prolific LW writers should occasionally go back and do a literature review of their own posts. When I write, I’m usually (not always) presenting freshly-developed thoughts. It’s like a miniature version of Kuhn, where one paradigm replaces another in rapid succession. Many threads are abandoned entirely. I assume others experience something like this too.
It amounts to research debt, where any individual article must be assumed to reflect something to the very primordial beginnings of thought on a subject, with a low prior likelihood of remaining relevant. Hence, there’s a relatively low cost to ignoring individual articles.
But by going back and identifying the areas where you have made sustained intellectual progress, I think it could help address this problem of research debt. It might also help give others a reasonable cause to investigate those threads of yours more closely.